Former Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton is never one to hold back, and he didn’t mince words about the Deebo Samuel incident. During the game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Nov. 10, Samuel’s frustration boiled over after kicker Jake Moody missed his third consecutive field goal.
He walked up to him and chastised him for his costly mistakes. However, long-snapper Taybor Pepper caught up with Samuel and tried to defend Moody. The verbal altercation between the two got heated, and Samuel grabbed his throat, an incident that went viral on social media.
Newton weighed in on the incident, siding with Samuel. Although he did not address whether he was right in throat-grabbing Pepper, he emphasized that Jake Moody’s three missed field goals warranted some tough love.
“Like the third miss? The third time’s the charm,” Newton said on his podcast on Monday. “That’s when I gotta put my hands up. This is when I gotta really be like, “Bro, you ain’t understanding you need to do your m*********ing job.” (4:31)
He added that Deebo Samuel held himself to a high standard and expected the same of his teammates.
“Have we seen Deebo do that? So I can see what the issue is, but this is coming from a competitive bunch of folk,” Newton said. (5:05)
Cam Newton said that the scolding might have worked because Moody went on to successfully send the ball flying through the goal on his next try, and the Niners won the game 23-20.
Kyle Shanahan explains Deebo Samuel’s throat-grabbing incident
San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan went so far as to say that it was Taybor Pepper who had overreacted and not Samuel who had grabbed Pepper’s throat.
“Oh yeah, totally. I think it was a little bit overreaction, and I don’t think, you never want Deebo to throw a baby punch or anything on anybody on our own team, but Deebo also wasn’t saying anything bad to Jake, like it sounded,” Shanahan told reporters after the game.
Shanahan also said it was just Pepper defending his kicker and might have misconstrued Samuel’s intention, leading to a scuffle between them.
